JUDICIARY: Black Red Freed

One day in the bleak, jittery summer of
1932 a 19-year-old Negro communist organizer named Angelo Herndon led a
hunger march of unemployed on Atlanta's courthouse. A few days later he
was arrested, held for eleven days without charges. Then Atlanta
prosecutors dusted off a Reconstruction law providing the death penalty
for "any attempt ... to induce others to join in any combined
resistance to the lawful authority of the State." In all its 66 years
no one had ever been convicted under that statute. Chiefly on the
evidence of communist pamphlets found in his possession, a Georgia...